New Tidings in Gamingway

Seriously though, I needed a break from Dark Souls. I decided to finally pick up Persona 4 again. The last time I played Persona 4 with any real attention was before I was married. So yeah, like four-plus years.

When I left off, I was about halfway through the Secret Laboratory dungeon. I think my first few hours of play were just reacquainting myself with the rules — plus trying to remember the story threads.

It’s a hard game to just “pick up” and “put down.” Seriously.

So I finished the Secret Laboratory — and let me tell you, it’s a pretty righteous feeling to have overcome that dungeon. It’s been a bugbear of mine for — well, some four-plus years. Not completing that dungeon has kept me from playing.

Also, I’m a different gamer now. 4-5 years ago, I didn’t have the patience for a “grind,” or farming an enemy with a low-encounter rate for a random drop that I needed for a quest to get some other thing. That’s a lot of displacement.

Now though? Man, this game is almost easy.

Actually, I figure there’s more for me to get out of the Persona series since the franchise exploded right around the time I was getting out of it. Now I can look back on its developments and nod in affirmation.

It’s kind of gratifying to see its success.

So where am I now in the game? I’m completing Social Links and rounding up quests. I’ve checked in on a couple walk-throughs to gauge my progress but I’m not aiming for 100% completion. Still, it’s fun maxing out Social Links.

I have to say though, Persona 3 is still my favorite. I liked the cast more — I like the Nanako/Dojima household dynamic and everything well enough, it’s very sweet — but I liked individual characters from P3 more.

See, P3 was new for me, and I really appreciated the references to not just Greek mythology — which I happened to be researching at the time — but some of the more obscure personalities from Greek myths. I felt privileged.

Also, I really appreciated the ending of Persona 3 and consider the events of uh, … any of its sequels which “undo” the events of the ending, “dis-continuity.”

I realize it’s a personal thing. But for me, it’s personal. So yeah.

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Discussion (14) ¬

Y’know, I considered getting into that franchise once, but I’m the sort of person who would be uncomfortable with the idea of doing so unless I started with Digital Devil. Also, not long after I started looking into it, Catherine came out (or was about to come out) and there was a lot of confusion as to whether or not it was somehow part of the Megami Tensei franchise, and the marketing campaign for it kinda turned me off of Atlus.

Reading your other comment, it probably doesn’t help to point out that apart from a shout-out/crossover moment, P3 and P4 are standalone games and stories. But so are most of the Final Fantasy titles. *shrug*

I have Nocturne kicking around in my games drawer, and cookiemonger has Innocent Sin, so I might actually play some of the other games in the series eventually. I’ve actually been watching a couple Let’s Plays from other games in MegaTen and its spin-offs.

I’m KIND of interested because — dungeon crawl — but I haven’t made a firm commitment to anything because… one game at a time. ;)

My list of unfinished JRPGs has grown woefully long, almost to the point where I’m not bothered by it anymore. My girlfriend sold my copies of Magna Carta and FFXII (for the Hyung Tae Kim character designs and for Fran respectively), Xenosaga was too terrible to finish, I lost the rom of Tales of something-or-other(the first one), and the list goes on.

The thing I liked about the old FF games most is that they hit the sweet spot of time commitment; all of them were around 35-45 hours, so they felt like long and full experiences but not so long that they dragged. It even gave them replayability (I’ve probably played through FF2 3 times; twice as an NES rom and once as the PS1 port), something kind of lacking in 80-someodd hour games. “That was fun, now I’ll never play it again”.

Yeah, that was kind of my problem with the NG+ of Persona 3. I adored that game — for its characters and its tone, and large in part for how its ending cast the entire rest of the game in a particular light — but it took a long time to play and even the prospect of carrying over items and money didn’t seem like “enough” to make a second play-through a worthy investment of time.

I didn’t replay P3 and I liked it a LOT more than P4 — so the odds of my replaying P4 (even on NG+) are ridiculously low.

I’m not sure if I ever got NG+ to work on an emulator. I did get to play ChronoTrigger on the SNES and I played that game a LOT. Not an every-ending kind of thing, I didn’t have that much patience as a kid. I played the heck out of ChronoCross too. NG+ up to here.

Most RPGs are way too long for the whole “every ending” thing. One of the worst offenders was probably Star Ocean 2 , where your endings were determined by easily messed up hidden stats whose workings were incredibly ill-defined. 80 unique endings in a 120+ hour RPG! Of course “unique” ending was defined by a matrix of combinations of possible endings, meaning that various endings could be almost identical with the exception of one character or pair of character’s cutscene being swapped with another.

Yeah. Persona 4 looks like an 80-100 hour game and it apparently has several “bad” endings, a “good” ending, and… based on its name, a canonical “true” ending. I will probably play an hour or less of a NG+ just to see what’s changed.

Dragon’s Dogma on the other hand, I actually got 4-5 hours out of the NG+ before cookiemonger suggested I play something else for a while (I would have totally stuck with it though!)

I have mixed feelings about multiple endings. On one hand, it’s awesome that there’s a large enough degree of player agency to actually affect the outcome of the story, but on the other hand, I know I’ll never be good enough to beat a Touhou game on hard mode without a single continue and get a true ending T-T